Recently Ian Foster, father of grid computing, provided a very clear and simple explanation of cloud vs. grid computing.In his blog http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/theres-grid-in.html he explained cloud vs. grids and how the industry has evolved and will continue to evolve. On identifying future opportunities he seems to reaffirm the opportunity we are pursuing at Kaavo, here is an excerpt from his blog, I highly recommend reading the blog for details.

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”In building this distributed “cloud” or “grid” (“groud”?), we will need to support on-demand provisioning and configuration of integrated “virtual systems” providing the precise capabilities needed by an end-user.”

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If I have to explain the difference in what Amazon, Google, MS, is doing for cloud vs. the value add we are providing in one sentence, I would say….Amazon, alt are providing virtual servers leveraging the virtualization technology, we are providing automation for creating, running, and maintaining custom integrated systems running on the virtual servers.

For our March Beta release, we are provinding two configurations (integrated systems), one for running J2EE applications using JBOSS and MySQL cluster and another one with preconfigured Liferay portal on the Jboss cluster.